Question re: Mages from a RL

Hi everyone,
I do not play a mage but am trying to evaluate our own mage's DPS output/logs.

He is avoiding to play arcane (and frost) and prefers fire to the other specs. So for now, lets just assume that playing a different spec is not something that will happen.

My main question revolves around combustion and wether or not it should be glyphed. Our view/understanding from mage alts is that it is nearly always a DPS increase to glyph it, a big part of this is because your pots/procs other benefits get multiplied with the glyph, while that doesn't happen to the same extent when unglyphed.

Could you please explain if we are mistaken? It just feels from going through his logs that he regularly lacks a few million DPS from combustion when we compare to other mages.

Does being a troll make such a huge difference to combustion from an extra tick (?) under berserking?

No logs, no armory, nothing to base a conclusion abt. But yes normally glyphing it is a no brainer, but there are situations that the normal cd is better it certainly aint 2 million damage difference though its just something small that proves to be a small damage increase overall, maybe even less with the nerfed combustion.. I just hope you aren't comparing that to top 100 logs, cause atm they are very skewed with old logs from the OP combustion or new logs with the best possible rng.

But I still say its really hard to lay judgement on anything without background info on his dps, rotation, gear, talents etc

As others have stated, glyphing combustion is a slight dps increase. However, this assumes that the mage is using combustion correctly in the first place. If they are just using combustion on cooldown without regard to the ignite on the target, or if they are missing opportunities by waiting too long for the 'perfect' ignite, or worse yet... forgetting to use it entirely, the glyph isn't going to make much of a difference. More than likely, it's a matter of improper use of combustion.

After the changes that occurred in 5.1 and the hotfixes afterward, combustion hits like a wet noodle anyway, so the dps problem may be something else entirely.

i typically always have combustion glyphed... i'd rather get two combustion's worth of damage off a single large ignite than try to get that large of an ignite twice. additionally, it is difficult to have procs/cooldowns available every 45 seconds.

A few million? Seriously? One glyphed combustion hits for about 500k damage a few million means he/she is missing multiple combustions OR having very shit combustions.
On a 1:30 cd and assuming you are casting the first one within the first 30 seconds, you want to cast 5 in 6:50 (+20 seconds for the full duration) and add some seconds for proper building of the ignite.

However Combustion cannot/should not be cast on CD, instead you want to time it hopefully in combination with 2 !Pyroblasts as well as some nice trinket or other Intellect buff. In either case you want a nice Ignite to be rolling, if you have logs look at the average ignites and make sure your mage is making use of spikes in Ignite damage to roll into combustion. Because of this soft requirement for a decent Combustion, you always have a lag between the CD and casting it... lets assume 5 seconds on average (quite low IMHO but yeah) and lets say 20 seconds at the start of the fight to build up ignite and stuff.
This means Unglyphed vs Glyphed can be cast at
020 020
070
120 115
170
220 210
270
320 305
370
420 400
470

Since Glyphed does double the damage the next unglyphed is always just catching up in damage to the Glyphed version, which means any fight lasting between 320 seconds and 370 will lose DPS using unglyphed instead of glyphed (bar fight mechanics)

Now this is sheer base Combustion mechanics, when counting in stuff like Alter time (3 minute CD) which can seriously augment Combustion damage (check that this is being used to roll more Ignite into Combustion). As well as increased damage due to Intellect procs, it is far more likely to be able to line all this up every 1:30 instead of every 0:45. Therefor it is logical to assume your Glyphed combustion will more consistantly roll a bigger ignite into it than the Unglyphed version.
Not to mention you have double the time to "fish" for it to be big(ger) since you only have one cast/cd time instead of 2 times to build it up.

Since any combustion should roll for 20k or more per tick, your extra tick on Combustion due to any haste proc or berserking or what not will do an additional 20k (or more) damage but will certainly not add millions of damage.

You can easily check in the logs for combustion casts, as the direct damage combustion does is logged as a seperate entry from the dot parts and will actually indicate the number of times it has been cast. Some fights might put constraints on the time you want to cast combustion (or definatly dont want to).

If your mage is missing dps overall, look at uptime for their bomb of choice.... and in particular Pyromaniac that is a result from it, anything below 95% should be explainable due to boss mechanics (Lei Shi - Hide, Blade lord - unseen strike, that type of thing) or a call for stop dps for some reason (Empress for example)

A few million? Seriously? One glyphed combustion hits for about 500k damage a few million means he/she is missing multiple combustions OR having very shit combustions.

Since any combustion should roll for 20k or more per tick, your extra tick on Combustion due to any haste proc or berserking or what not will do an additional 20k (or more) damage but will certainly not add millions of damage.

;'[''' its the healer's fault. i ended up pulling aggro when he went invisible, did the aoe and meleed me to death. and then, wind step debuff killed me. i can only greater invis and iceblock so many of them off before it's on the healers to heal.